Three Rifles

 

WE USED TO keep a gun, hidden and unloaded. The shells were separate, in an unlikely spot under scraps of fabric in a sewing closet. In our rural township guns are tools, just like kitchen knives and garden spades. When they’re needed, they’re needed. So we guarded that gun and shells—for emergencies.

 

An Emergency: The First Gun Incident: The Skunk

Take the afternoon a young mother down the road looked out her kitchen window and saw a skunk weaving in erratic circles across a mowed hay field. Not one to panic, she got the binoculars. Eyes glued to the skunk’s uncertain antics, her own uncertain questions turned to certainty.

She was alone. Her husband was working in town—he had the family car. In an hour a yellow school bus would stop at the end of her farm road. Her children would clamber down, ready to run, skip or dally up along the long gravel farm lane bordering the hay field. She called the neighbors, hoping for a farmer with a gun—no one answered. She called the sheriff’s department. A serious interstate accident had tied up their men; it was more urgent than a rabid skunk. She called the school, trying to alert the bus driver. The phone lines were busy. When I picked up my phone I heard agitation, a frantic request—“Pray!”

Back then, not many people had cell phones, but her husband did. He got her message, dropped everything, and sped home just in time to get his hunting gun, load it, take aim, and pull the trigger. The suffering innocent rabid animal was mercifully out of agony before the yellow school bus full of children reached their farm road.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate lethal weapons. I’m not taking sides in the gun-control debate. But a gun was needed that day. In fiction, Atticus Finch needed a gun to shot the mad dog and protect Tom Robinson. The bigot who shot Robinson did not need a gun. Weapons aren’t the problem. You already know what I’m thinking; you’re thinking it too, “People are the problem.”

Potential weapons—poisons, ropes, sharp objects, and hard implements surround us. Automobiles are lethal, but they’re inanimate too. As a skinny eleven-year-old, my skinnier ten-year-old sister chased me around the kitchen table with a butcher knife— to cut off my fat—I had none. My Dad grabbed her and stopped bloodshed. We’re both in our seventies now and have lived with kitchen knives for over half a century, often safely working together slicing turkeys, dicing onions, and paring potatoes.

It’s naïvely obvious to say that knives, guns, ropes and poisons are categorically bad, stupid, or dangerous. The human heart is dangerous. My eighty-one year old husband has covered my back for decades; he’s my best friend and insists he loves me more each day, but once guns nearly destroyed us. Once I wanted them out of the house. I hated them. They terrorized me.

The first frightful shot fell into the summer of 1961—and the trigger wasn’t even pulled. I’ve written it up as a chapter in an unfinished autobiographical chronicle.

 

The Second Gun Incident: The Day Krushchev, or Somebody, Didn’t Get Killed.

It began as a fair morning, fully fair in the old fashioned sense of lovely—rich with dew that soon evaporates under the hot Iowa sun. Oh, first, it’s essential before readers enter the day with me, to know that Nikita Kruschev visited Iowa in 1959, not 1961. That historical fact makes my story, as it actually happened, totally impossible. Impossible! It’s a fabrication. Nevertheless, it truly happened just as written. Verily.  Alcohol fumes and all.

I’d prefer to forget it, but it won’t go away. It sticks in my craw. From time to time it rises up like a seasonal flood through a bridgeless river too wide, deep and wild to cross. It sweeps me into its current. Avoiding confrontation with such a rush of unprocessed emotion, I usually dilly-dally in getting to the point. I’ve torn up and crumpled a ream of paper seeking words of understanding, trying to build a boat. Invariably storms come, the current page gets blown away or soaking wet, words collapse—and I flee turbulence, confused again. Even so, I keep writing, knowing that someday I’ll find words true enough to bridge the gaps between now and then or a safe way to paddle crosscurrent to the far shore. If  I’ve decided to “go public” with my manuscript, it’s happened.

There’s a moral imperative to telling our stories. There’s a vital hope of reaching readers who will get something positive from us, who can curiously read between the lines and begin to see themselves more clearly as they identify with the suffering, conflicts, and denials of others. Love once blinded my eyes; I’m sure it still does. It’s a psychological truism that both fear and bonded affections can block out objective reality.

The day I’m writing about was an Eastern Iowa summer at its best. The heat didn’t overpower, it was just hot enough to incubate the corn into visible audible growth, not yet hot enough to set off jokes about popping. The sky was a legato of blues blending in to light. Looking into it was endless, like breathing eternity. That day the sky came down and pressed its quiet into me.

I was in grad school at the University of Iowa, married, pregnant, with a half completed MA in English. I was outwardly confident, competent, and too goal oriented and successful to know that I was also fragile, sensitive and broken inside.

We both wanted our baby. Baby wasn’t planned. Back then, before ultra sounds, we didn’t trouble much over gender, we just smiled and nodded when older and wiser family said, “All you want is ten little fingers and ten little toes.” We also never talked about alternatives, voiced second thoughts, or murmured complaints. In the late fifties and early sixties, most middle class families we knew accepted the responsibilities of babies as a natural consequence of nights of love. My parent’s only admonition against full physical intimacy before marriage was their warning—you might get pregnant—and that might wreck your life (or their dreams for it). The concept of chastity before marriage, a holy and gloriously fulfilling marriage bed reflecting the communion of a holy God with a holy people was unknown. The concept of ungoverned sex as a natural satisfaction of appetite in the human animal was unknown to us too.

So there I was, a married woman. After marriage children were an expected reality. My husband was thrilled with his manhood, proud that he was virile enough to father a child. I was full of easy going self-assurance about my own ability to complete grad school, be a good wife, and take care of baby. Lots of married students had children.

We went to pre-natal classes at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. We learned breathing exercises, practiced pinning diapers and bathed a life-sized doll in a dishpan. Every evening my husband asked, “Have you done your stretching exercises?” Every morning he left the house to skip classes, get drunk, and cry alone in fear and frustration, wondering what he’d gotten himself into. Our advent responsibility stretched him—but in the 1940’s and ’50’s, when men were taught not cry,  he hid his frailty and brokenness, ordered another drink and acted as if all was hunky-dory.

We’d rented a high-ceilinged two-room apartment above an electrical shop in downtown Iowa City. It was quite close to campus. I went to classes, studied, reached out to touch my husband, warm beside me every night, and knew life was good. I thought.

As the summer term ended, my husband took charge. In a manly voice, he announced that I’d have to quit school, we were moving to Chicago. Since I was having a baby, he had to support us. He never mentioned that he was flunking out. Five months earlier, I had vowed to love, honor, and obey. No second thoughts.

So that day, the one it hurts to remember, I was packing up for the movers. There wasn’t much, our clothes, my lit books, shower gifts like our blue enamel cookware, metal dish drainer and pink Pyrex mixing bowls. The almost empty cupboards held a few storage boxes of wedding gifts.

Now why, while packing up on a hot Saturday morning, the left over champagne from our wedding got unpacked and why the too extravagant Orrefors crystal goblets from my parents got unpacked, and why after each glass of champagne my husband said he had to throw the glass against the wall, and why the champagne made him hungry and he popped a pot of popcorn on the stove, and why the popcorn made him thirstier so that he had to drink more champagne, and why one bottle was not enough and two didn’t satisfy his thirst, I did not know.

I didn’t know why he got the dustpan and ever so carefully swept up the tiny splinters of each shattered goblet before deliberately unwrapping the next delicate glass. He carefully rinsed each one before filling it with champagne. He didn’t let me help. He didn’t he listen when I cried, “Don’t!” “Please! Don’t!”

I did not know why he got out his rifle and spread thick newspapers over the card table that served us as our kitchen counter, a dining room table, and study desk. I watched him unzip his warm sepia leather gun case and carefully lay the Winchester on the newspaper to clean each part before loading it. It was like a movie. I was a bystander, not a participant. I did not know why he kept checking the morning newspaper spread out on the card table before him for the time and the caravan route. When he started confiding in me, I did not know if I should believe his words or not. They were unreal. When he started talking, I did not know why he was quite determined to shoot and kill the visiting Russian VIP who was traveling through Iowa that day. We had not heard of the gulag. We did not know the extent of the man’s wickedness.

Watching, listening, I did not know why every cell in my being was stretched or why even the spaces between the particles of my soul came into focus. I didn’t know why I, an agnostic with shattered faith, leaned against the window frame and looked out into the brilliant blue reaching high and perfect beyond our eyes— stretching out far above the city pavement that surrounding the electric shop. I didn’t know I was praying wordless prayers with every atom taut inside my body. I didn’t know why he fell, fully dressed and washed and shaved, all ready to drive his little orange Volkswagen out to the site in the country where the dignitary’s travel route would come near us. I don’t know what I might have done had he walked down those creaky, worn dimly lit narrow apartment steps and out into the street. He didn’t. He fell, fully dressed, into a long sleep. He sprawled across the bed while the sun was high in the sky, the sky that had entered into me. I just stood there as he slept, leaning against the window frame, looking out into the blue, being in the quiet. Breathing in the peace.

I missed the Orrefors stemware. It was beautiful. Extravagant. My husband said he never liked it. He said it was like us, too thin, too fragile, like drinking from a light bulb.

Right now, I’m a seventy-five year old woman, sitting at a computer, recalling her twenty-one year old self— and feeling old restraints break off; a gut-tightness is loosening up. No raging currents of storm, only waves of relief and dampness in my eyes. My green tea is hot, a light Japanese blend. My husband sits nearby, deep into his morning meditations. Early on a single deer was grazing close to the house. It rained earlier and more is on the way. All is fresh, and alive, inside and out. There is healing, restoration, goodness. The rain begins again. It’s steady. The thunder is near. Through the open door the air breathes cool and clean. The world around is being washed. I give my husband the manuscript to read.

Later, sitting in the kitchen over another cup of tea, I ask my husband what he thinks about my manuscript. He says at first he struggled with shame, he didn’t want others to know. He recalls his outrage against Russia in the 1960’s. That’s all he remembers; the rest is gone. He reflects a bit on blackouts, then he says my writing’s good. I reassure him and promise I won’t publish without his OK. He says go ahead, “What have I got to lose. I was the town drunk for years.”

We talk more—about JFK’s death, about what might have been if he’d gone out that day with his gun. I wonder if,  by wild coincidence,  the newspaper under his Winchester might have been an old one, a year to the day. The sound of rain surrounds us, pouring hard on the roof, running off the eaves, splashing over the gutters. An old song comes to mind and we sing, “There shall be showers of blessing, sent from the heavens above. . . .”

When I come to “Mercy drops round us are falling, but for the showers we plead,” I stop. Pleading for mercy drops would be dishonest. I’m living with mercy, I’ve been living mercy for years. Right now, this moment, it’s showering. A closed dry place, an old parched spot inside my soul, has opened up to abundant rain.

Back around 1970, not long after divorcing my husband, a black prophet-preacher walked up to me after church one day and abruptly said that God was going to heal the wounds of my marriage and take away every scar. I didn’t believe him. I certainly never thought God would ask me to remarry the man or put it into me to write a story about a Winchester. Or that then He’d show up with healing rains when we talked about it together.

I am still slowly  learning that we need to see a crime and our own blindness to it before we can fully forgive it.  When we’re blind at unexplored levels, it may take supernatural grace to see and accept our denials and let go of them. Only then, with the knife pain of truth’s freedom still stinging in our heart, do we begin to truly love.

 

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The Third Gun Incident: The Rolling Block—It Isn’t Automatic.

It happened in Wisconsin on a winter Saturday when we were snowed in.

He was near the top of the hill, looking down with stud appeal, no jacket or coat, his Navy watch cap askew, his red plaid Pendleton shirt half unbuttoned, one glove off, nonchalant. Watching me.

Dry drifts were whipping uphill, wrapping around my legs. The going was slow. I  had to break through older crusts and fresh dry snow with every step. As one boot pushed down to find firmer footing, I lifted the other. Occasionally, I slipped and wavered to regain balance. Stinging wet slipped inside my boots, icy bites into soft skin. Coatless, I hugged myself, forcing ahead through the cold.

I was beyond worried, part deadened, part curious, trapped in a mixed-up place inside of scared and stunned.

The winter sun was unbroken, steady; the familiar hill down to the big house and the frozen lake felt pulled apart from time, separated under unremitting light, enclosed in whiteness.

I reached him. My voice came out concerned, “Are you all right? ”

“Yes.”  A rifle I’d never seen was in his hands. I pretended to ignore it.

Inside, it had been warm, safe. Earlier that morning he’d built a fire; it still burned cleanly, softly flickering sounds played around the hearth. Changing reflective glows burnished his Dad’s collection of polished horse brasses with firelight. It was peaceful there. Orderly. Our baby, two months old, colicky the night before, was napping. The gunshots hadn’t disturbed his sleep. I’d checked.

Outside, on the open hill, with woods to the right and the left, the lake behind me, and the long uphill drive to the road before me, I climbed under the tall bare expertly trimmed maples. In summer they lightly shaded the wide lawns that sloped down between the woods toward the house and lake below. Now, fully iced in, the entire world was wrapped in frigid silence, a place cut off, alone.

Objectively, his cheeks were pink; I was shivering. The cold was living, the sun without warmth, and the wind, the continual wind, blew shards of light through the air. Rainbow snow splinters flew every which way as changing currents sculpted and re-sculpted the drifts.

The lake estates around us had been winterized and closed up weeks ago. Almost daily snows, the latest fresh and dry last night, had shut us in on every side.

The shots had come strange. Out of order, with pauses between. I reacted. I ran upstairs to check the bedrooms. He wasn’t there. More shots, I ran downstairs to check the basement. More silence again. Was he OK? Was someone shooting from the caretaker’s cottage? I wanted him. I heard another shot. Then another. Not many, but they kept coming. He wasn’t in the house. I hurried from window to window, systematically looking first toward the lake, next toward the woods. I scanned the lake shore in both directions through the dining room windows. Last I looked out through the closed up summer porch where our furniture was stored: an old loveseat, a modern chair, a plastic topped coffee table and the expensive mahogany television cabinet from my dad. That’s when I saw him, through the porch windows that looked out toward the back.  There he was, climbing the hill behind the house.

That was either December 1961 or January 1962. We were less than a year out of college, job hunting, and accepting the joys and calls of our honeymoon baby.

This morning, October, more than fifty years later, I asked him about it, wondering if he even remembered. His face lit up. He immediately said,

“It was a 7 millimeter Remington.”

Since his chemo fatigue, he’s been fading out yesterdays; he forgets birthdays and anniversaries, he forgets details of births and deaths, even our weddings are fuzzy, but a gun? Fifty-one years later? Suddenly loquacious, he says,  “A world class rifle.”

“I got it from Golden State Arms in California. I mailed them a money order. $9.95—something like that. It was a sporting magazine ad. It was used internationally—in all sorts of revolutions. They claimed the stocks most likely had blood on them.”

I cringe inside. I couldn’t remember his buying a gun, so I asked. He said,

“I already owned it. Before we got married. Most likely sent for it during that dropout semester. I picked it up at the post office. I remember getting it. At the Bay.”

I wanted to know more and asked him why he shot it that day.

“I wanted to.”

We’d never talked about it. Only a short exchange back then, out there, on that cold hillside—my scared young trusting voice asking, “Are you all right?”

His confident reply, “I’m fine” didn’t stop my shivering.

I believed him that day, believed that he was fine, and asked, “What happened?”

Did he know what  I was really asking? Did I know?  He answered,

“I shot that television cabinet from your Dad. I dragged it up to the top of the hill and shot it down to the lake.”

While he was silently grappling with that big, heavy cabinet, pulling it up the cold hill, I’d been warm and  content, folding diapers in the formal dining room of his parent’s summer home. His explanation continued,

“It slid a bit with every hit—from the impact. A tree stopped it. It took more shots, first on one side—then the other, to move it all the way down the bank and out onto ice.”

Now, more than half a century later, was it my imagination or a regression? Standing there, looking at this frailed-out, gray whiskered and wrinkled old husband of mine, I saw a current flash through his blue eyes. Instantly, it set back me into the cold, I was surrounded with the light, looking once again at a cleanly shaven young face, seeing the glint in his blue eyes and wondering, “Is he pleased with what he’s done? He seems pleased.”

If he wasn’t exactly pleased with himself back then, he sure sounded eager. He sounded eager then and he sounded eager now—an eighty year old man, eager to talk about a gun, his aging voice lilts with music just  like that bold twenty-five year old who once asked me, “Do you want to climb down the bank and see it? I’ll go with you.”

I didn’t. I shivered. I didn’t want to risk sliding out onto the ice—cracks hid under the snow all along that shore. I’d already seen enough. His words had been vivid—I’d a picture of the polished mahogany sliding across the snow. I answered,

“No. I’m cold.” I felt nothing else.

But our next words stuck, like they were frozen in time. I can still call them up with ease. Was my voice back then really as apologetic and uncertain as it wounds my memory today?

Hopefully wiser now, I remind myself of the mind’s reconstructive potential. Sighing, shaking my head, I get ahold of myself. It’s healthier to reject this particular self-absorbed introspectively analytical rabbit trail. At seventy-five I’m too old for speculative downers about exactly which surprise or which-shot-when eroded innocence, stole naïvete, crushed trust, and shot long-lasting leaks into my once girlish self-confidence. Such stuff breeds bitterness not wholeness, healing, and joy.

It is enough to clearly recall that day and listen to my own hesitant voice, so quickly caught and carried away by the wind. I simply said something like,

“I didn’t know what made the noise. I was afraid it would wake the baby. I thought something was wrong.”

It is more than enough to replay his reply. It is engraved with strong cuts, without loss or doubt. He explained himself. That was not like him back then, not at all.

“I was reading Hesse, Steppenwolf, and thought it would be fun. Got the idea there.”

I instantly disliked Hesse forever.

Walking down hill toward the house with the wind at my back was easier. Keeping to my own boot-steps, I retraced my way, lifting one foot up, carefully setting one foot down. I don’t know where he went.

In weird disbelief I went straight to the closed up, unheated porch where heavy storm windows had replaced summer screens and his parent’s white wicker furniture waited under percale sheets for warmer weather. I was brittle cold, well past shivering.The polished mahogany cabinet was gone.

I’m sure that I made his lunch and dinner on time that Saturday. Most likely it was soup and a sandwich. And I’m sure we went to bed in peace that night. And life went on. We had two more children. We moved five more times. Then divorce. Remarriage. His. Another family. His. Divorce again. His. Remarriage again. Me to him and Him to me. Again. After thirty years apart that never killed the ties that bind.

Today he smells like peanut butter. He is emptying the dishwasher and says, “ I just had a peanut butter sandwich and an apple.”

I’m still thinking about the past and ask, “Did it have a name? The gun?”

“Yeah.” He broke into a big smile.  It was called the Rolling Block. 7 millimeter. That’s “mm” in small letters.”

He looks in my eyes. Relationally, “It was a single shot.”

He is the aspergers /engineer type, not easily relational. Single shot with a look like that is rich.

He looks back at the dishwasher, “I suppose you could have done more damage if it was a repeater. You could do anything with it.”

I was silent.

His voice lilts again, “ Get it in the mud. Bang it up. It would still shoot. It was indestructible. You could drop it in the water, let the water run out and still shoot it. You see it wasn’t automatic. The only bad thing about it was that someone could shoot you while you were reloading.”

I went to the computer and googled Rolling Block. Not that I was checking his memory. He was right.

The Remington Rolling Block rifle was a breech-loading rifle produced from the mid 1860s into the late 19th century by E. Remington and Sons (later Remington Arms Company). The action was extremely strong, and could easily withstand the increased pressure of the new smokeless powders coming into use by the late 1880s. . . .

It went on. I didn’t read it all.

Twenty-four hours later, over breakfast, I was still thinking about how cold it was that long-ago morning. Still processing. Wondering if I’d disappointed him by not going down onto the ice. He knew right away what I was talking about when I said, “I never told anyone. Never told my folks. Never told yours. I never confronted you. When it came up in therapy I talked about it like I was watching a movie. . . . .but . . . last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up, it was different. I re-lived it.”

He was still. I went on.

“You know what I felt?”

He was silent, listening.

“I felt buried contempt. For you, but for myself, too. It’s hurting us. I didn’t know it was there. I prayed. I asked, “Why?”

He was still listening, he asked, “Why what?”

“Why didn’t I process it? Why did I deny? Why didn’t I deal with it— or take the baby and leave you.”

My husband is an information man. He likes ideas or cars, tractors and boilers. He avoids emotions, personal disclosures. His answer surprised me.

“It was pretty sick behavior. I’d been drinking. My Dad’s Crabbe 12.”
I hadn’t known that. It was my turn to be still. So he’d been drunk. Did that change anything? He was a good shot, drunk or sober. I could still picture the cabinet’s mahogany grain and swirls. I said,

“That cabinet was mine.”

Contempt rose up again; it tasted bad. Was it for myself or for him? What emotions was I hiding, denying? Reproach? Hurt? I didn’t let go.

“That cabinet was from my folks—my Dad. A gift. He gave it.”

Fifty-year old blasts went off in my stomach. They curdled my coffee. Was this about my Dad, too?

I had to forgive my husband. I would forgive him. I could forgive him, but not yet.

He shoots me another look. He’s uncharacteristically quiet.

Musing, as much to myself as to him, I ask, “Why didn’t I tell someone?”

No answer. He usually has answers for everything.

“Do you know what came into my head when I asked, ‘Why?’ ”

He fished, “That you were an enabler?”

I shake my head with nos.

“  —That I was nuts?”

“No.” I paused. It was hard to say. It felt lame, but I finally got it it.

“I actually thought, ‘He’s a man.’ ”

I explained myself, “I thought I couldn’t leave you because you were a man. I thought you didn’t talk to me because you were a man. I thought that I couldn’t confront you or disagree with you because you were a man. I was blocked. I was like your  Remington. I needed to be cued up and loaded with a right script for each occasion. I needed someone to pull the trigger and release permission for me to be real.”

His answer was pure twenty-first century,  “A feminist would shred that to pieces.”

I was quiet. He was right.

I went on, “My Dad bought that cabinet. He was proud of it. Solid wood.”
His response was quick, no reloading.

“Your Dad was a man, too. He set you up.”
He was right again. In silence, I reload—it’s old ammo.

“So why destroy his cabinet? Were you crazy?”
He disarms me.

“You were good to me.”

I paused. I couldn’t deny it. I was good to him—all the time. While drinking, he was not good to me. For me, kindness was easy back then. Later it wasn’t quite as easy. Still later, after our divorce, dark fell and filled me with bitterness, anger, and unkind thoughts. Remembering that season a bad old taste filled my mouth. I recognize it immediately— a glimpse of my selfish nature, the enemy rising up within. I’ve learned to welcome resentments, blame, judgments and all the junk that steals peace and separates me from union with God as an invitation to clean house: to cut it off, get rid of it, repent, forgive, pray, ask Jesus’ for more love and healing. It reminds me to be gentle to accept myself and others as we are. We all need God’s forgiveness and merciful loving kindness both for ourselves and one another.

After our divorce I intentionally battled to regain courage, peace and sweetness. I tried group therapy, counseling, twelve-step meetings, prayer and deliverance. All to heal my heart, to seek order, to proactively choose my values. A bit of a utopian, a longing for happiness seemed wired into my soul. I ached for fulfillment, for courtesy, kindness, beauty and truth.

My husband is a good man. With liquor out of the way, his values match mine. Despite my INFP to his ESTJ, in a crazy way we are spiritual Siamese twins. Something inside of him matches the longings inside of me. He was born good. His goodness is in his DNA. I knew it from our first date. Years later, after our divorce, he was spiritually born again into the Kingdom of God. Then, Jesus’ goodness replaced his own. But our first marriage together— oh he was not good to me, not good at all.

I knew all that. It swirled around us as our conversation continued, and I purposefully ignored it. I actually felt mean.

Thinking together. I asked him, “So what were you shooting?”

Waiting for his reply, I remembered the pleasure of polishing fine mahogany. At last he said, “I don’t know. It’s pretty buried. Maybe I wanted a target. Maybe something it wouldn’t matter losing.” After a long time he adds,  “It hurt whenever someone cared.”

I melt. He reaches his hand toward mine. I move closer toward him. He’d thought about his gesture; I had too. We aren’t reacting; this touch is not automatic. When he talks again, his voice is apologetic, uncertain. Wavering, “Forgive me?”

My eyes get all wet, automatically and easily. I can’t stop smiling. Happily. It’s automatic too.

So is the “Um-humm” and the nod of my head.

The day is warm, the sun soft, the air moves gently. Tall field grasses sway like waters rippling across a lake. A few golden leaves are floating off the trees.

He sold the rolling block in 1971—shortly after our divorce, long before our remarriage, but he remembers it well: “Get it in the mud. Bang it up. It would still shoot. It was indestructible. You could drop it in the water, let the water run out and still shoot it. It wasn’t automatic.”

Like us. Once fragile and broken, we’ve survived and live today in a marriage that has proved indestructible— but never automatic. We’re both too old for guns now, so we skirt around skunks in the daytime, watch for rabid emotions, make our choices, and live with them together.